Kubelik, Cso Tap Warmth Of Bruckner

March 08, 1985|By John von Rhein, Music critic.

Rafael Kubelik began a two-week Chicago Symphony engagement Thursday night in Orchestra Hall with the most expansive of the Bruckner symphonies, the Eighth. It was a solidly satisfying performance, typical of Kubelik`s approach in its musical honesty, good-hearted warmth and plain-spoken absence of rhetoric.

The conductor was not unmindful of the anxieties and conflicts that struggle to the surface in the score--the death-haunted coda to the first movement in particular. But he did not choose to dwell on them, stressing instead the evolution from darkness into the affirmative light of the great finale, in which Bruckner proclaims his humble faith against the fanfares of massed trumpets and Wagner tubas. Those who prefer their Bruckner

straightforwardly rather than brilliantly played could not have been disappointed.

In company with many of today`s Bruckner conductors, Kubelik opted for the revised edition of the score as edited by Robert Haas, which restores cuts the pathologically self-critical Bruckner made in the Adagio and finale. He believes, rightly so, that the fuller text is truer to the composer`s musical vision. And Kubelik`s account--some imprecise violin entrances and ensemble notwithstanding--admirably supported his convictions.

Indeed, so accustomed are we to hearing this music larded with all manner of unwritten ritards, agogic accents, rubato and other expressive devices in the 19th-Century manner that Kubelik`s relatively steady pulse and refusal to distort Bruckner`s long paragraphs seemed positively refreshing. The massive structure was treated as a single, huge arch, every detail accounted for, every climax properly scaled, every organlike sonority duly balanced.

Perhaps Kubelik did not make manifest the simple pieties of the Adagio with quite the fervent nobility that some noted Brucknerians of the past have brought to this sublimely inward movement. But the easygoing peasant-roughness of his Scherzo and the striding magnificence of his finale--in which Bruckner seems to draw all strands of his life-experience into a great musical synthesis--were more than compensation.

The 90-minute work occupied the entire program, for what music could precede such a colossal score and what could possibly follow such a performance?

Jean-Pierre Rampal`s every visit to Chicago affords a chance to renew one`s appreciation of the elegant art of one of the world`s master flutists. He returned to Orchestra Hall Wednesday night, bringing along his reliable accompanist, John Steele Ritter, who divided his attention between harpsichord (for the all-baroque first half) and piano.

The French flutist`s essentially romantic approach to baroque music has always been a matter of taste. Despite his deployment of subtly varied phrasing, dynamics and tone color, a certain sameness of effect was evident in the baroque sonatas that occupied Wednesday`s program. Three sonatas by Bach and Handel may be asking too much of a general audience, even in an anniversary year.

Still, Rampal`s breath control remains one of the supreme wonders of the flute world, and he tossed off Bach`s rapid, ornate figuration with particular relish. One would be less than candid, however, to claim that his precicipitous rendering of Corelli`s ``La Follia``--complete with dropped notes--was prime Rampal.

This listener found more meaningful musicmaking in the transcriptions and arrangements of Mozart, Gershwin and Bartok works that came later in the concert. Although the flute sounded a bit thin in the facile scale sequences of Mozart`s Sonata in D, K.306 (adapted from a piano-violin sonata), Rampal caught the cantabile quality of the slow movement with charm and finesse. Ritter made a fluent partner, even if he sometimes proved too deferential in this keyboard-dominated music.

Cannily exploiting register contrasts in the second of Gershwin`s three preludes, Rampal proved these bluesy-jazzy pieces can swing just as nicely on flute as on piano. The Gallic pied-piper then dispatched Bartok`s ``Hungarian Peasant Suite`` in an exhilarating whirl of folk colors and rhythms.